Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have by Allen Zadoff

The cover picture and the title say it all.  This is a book about a fat high school male.  And while a lot of the book was about Andrew's weight, it was also about finding your place in high school, whether you're a fat kid, or a former fat kid, or a nerd, or a stellar athlete.  At times this book seemed a bit of a fairytale: the fat kid Andrew plucked out of sophomore obscurity and suddenly on the varsity football team, and everyone seemed a little too nice, like in Steve Kluger's My Most Excellent Year, but the spectacular way it all fell apart in the end (that's all I'm saying) brought this book back to reality in ways that Kluger's never quite did.  (Not that I found that as a problem with My Most Excellent Year, I liked it very much.  It just wasn't 100% realistic.)  That said, Zadoff's debut YA novel is a really fun guy read that's a pretty honest take on the experience.  There were some things that I wish had been more fully explored, like Andrew's concern for his younger sister's health, and having gone to high school in Worcester, I couldn't believe that Worcester would ever be playing Newton in football before the playoffs.  Still, on a whole, I really liked this book, and it's an easy one to recommend.